The many small tribes of Washington each had their own name for the forests, streams, river, plains and valleys of our state. In 1776, Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy named Cape Flattery (because he flattered himself that the cape marked the entrance to the great inland sea ... (which the Indians called the 'sea in the forest'). The Spanish came in the 1790s and used the names of saints, ships and government officials to name places, mostly in the San Juan Islands.

Captains Vancouver and Gray arrived in 1792 and provided names for about 70 places in the Puget Sound region. The Columbia River, for example, was named after Gray's ship. By the 1830's the British Hudson's Bay Company established forts at Vancouver, Spokane, Walla Walla, Colville and Nisqually and added their names to Washington places. The Wilkes expedition of 1841, named points of land along the Washington coast and the Puget Sound interior. When the pioneers arrived, they names virtually everything that wasn't already named. Climbers contributed names of mountain peaks, valleys, glaciers and streams as they explored the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges. Yet, despite more than 200 years of naming the places of Washington, there are still lots of places that remain nameless, waiting for the next generation of explorers, climbers, and pioneers.

Washington Place Names was written by Gary Fuller Reese, Managing Librarian for the Tacoma Public Library's Northwest Room and Special Collections. Mr. Reese spent more than 25 years reviewing the literature, searching documents and maps, and visiting everyplace below 6,000 feet to insure the accuracy of this database, updating the work of such pioneer writers as Edmund S. Meany and Robert Hitchman.